In The News:

Palestinians Aim To Change The Rules, Harness International Community To Isolate Israel

Weeks ahead of the Israeli elections, Palestinian officials are already plotting a series of tough steps against Israel to be taken if, as polls predict, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is re-elected and peace efforts remain stalled.

Emboldened by their newly upgraded status at the United Nations, the Palestinians are talking of filing war crimes charges against Israel, staging mass demonstrations in the West Bank, encouraging the international community to impose sanctions, and ending the security cooperation that has helped preserve quiet in recent years.

These plans, combined with growing international impatience with Israeli settlement construction on occupied land, could spell trouble and international isolation for the Israeli leader.

Perhaps most troubling to Israel, the Palestinians also want to use their upgraded status on the world stage to push for international action against Israel.

Officials say they will move to join the International Criminal Court, where they hope to pursue war crimes charges against Israel for its settlement activities. Although the road to taking legal action in the ICC appears to be long and complicated, it nonetheless has made Israeli officials jittery.

“We are going to pursue this policy to reach a point of having the international community impose sanctions on Israel,” said Qais Abdelkareem, another PLO official.

Grand Ayatollah Declares All Christian Women May Be Raped

Jihadi leader Ahmad Al Baghdadi Al Hassani has spoken of Christians as polytheists and friends of the Zionists, in an Egyptian TV address. The extremist leader further stressed they must choose “Islam or death”, while their women and girls may legitimately be regarded as wives of Muslims.

That’s an indirect way of saying that any Christian woman or girl may be captured and raped, even if she is already married, since within Islam captive women may be raped by their captors.

The Iraqi Shiite Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ahmad al-Hassani al Baghdadi gave his call to murder Christians in an interview with Egyptian television station Al Baghdadia known. Al Baghdadi, who is one of the most radical representatives of the Islamic Jihad, denounced the Christians as polytheists and friends of the Zionists. The command of Al Baghdadis to the Christian minority in Iraq is “conversion to Islam or death.” The women and girls of the Christians “can legitimately regarded as the Muslim women,” said the Grand Ayatollah. Al Baghdadi, who comes from Najaf in Iraq, one of the “holy cities” of Shiite Islam, now lives in Syria, where he supports the armed struggle of the Islamists.

Ex-Muslim To Spill Truth At Ravi Zacharias Conference

The Muslim Brotherhood, which now is in power in Egypt, is the Sunni transnational movement founded in Egypt in 1928 that has spawned most of the major global terrorist movements, including al-Qaida and Hamas. Its aim is to help make Islamic law supreme over the world.

The Justice Department, which says ISNA is a Brotherhood front on American soil, named the group an unindicted co-conspirator in its prosecution of a plot to provide material support to Hamas terrorists.

An Arabic-language internal Brotherhood document presented in the 2009 trial described the work of the Brotherhood in America as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands … so that … Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Robert Spencer, a noted author on Islam who monitors relevant daily news at JihadWatch.org, says that while recognizing the diversity of belief and actions among Muslims worldwide, the fundamental Islam of the religion’s prophet, Muhammad, defines peace as a world completely under the authority of the Quran.

The Quran (9:29) and Islamic law, he writes in a column Thursday, “direct Muslims to wage war against and subjugate the ‘People of the Book’ – that is, primarily Jews and Christians – not if they behave badly by supporting Israel or Middle Eastern dictators, but simply because they are not Muslims.”

At this point in the article we come to the author's salvation story and it is definitely worth printing in full:

Qureshi said he was told he went in the wrong direction, abandoning Islam and embracing Christian faith, “because I trusted my own mind.”

“Muslims are taught, ‘This is what you’re supposed to believe. Listen to your imam. Listen to the elders. Listen to the sheik. You cannot think for yourself,’” he said.

“If someone comes in and says, ‘You’re believing the wrong thing,’ they’re just going to get confused by that,” said Qureshi.

It’s one of the reasons, he believes, God is reaching many Muslims around the world through dreams and visions.

It happened to him, he said, at the time a Christian friend was engaging him with the Gospel.

“At that time, I asked the Lord to guide me, himself, and he gave me some visions and dreams which led me to accept the Lord,” he said.

His first dream, he said, was “very symbolic,” and he asked God to follow it with “a clear dream.”

“He put me into a parable of the Bible, a parable I had not read,” he said.

“I was standing at a narrow door, and I was looking at a room with a feast. There were all these people dressed up. And I knew that they were in heaven. That that room is heaven. And they are waiting for the owner to come and start the feast. But I can’t get in, because I haven’t accepted my friend’s invitation.

He said that immediately after the dream, a friend directed him to Jesus’ reference in Luke 13 to the narrow gate.

“There were some exact parallels,” he said, referring to the narrow door that leads to the feast of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

When the owner comes, Jesus said, the door will close.

“That was a dream where God told me very clearly, ‘Here’s where you are Nabeel, you are outside the door. You need to respond to the invitation.’”

In a third dream, he said, “God show me that the path of truth leads out of the mosque.”

Joel 2:28-29:

"I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days."

Scuds Blast Syrian Rebel Push For Al-Safira Chemical Arms Store

The Syrian Air Force is again firing Scud missiles, this time to stem the general offensive Syrian opposition forces, including jihadis, launched Friday, Dec. 21, to capture the Syrian army’s military-industrial complex at al Safira and the big chemical and biological weapons store adjoining the facility. It is there, that Scud D missiles stand ready for launching, loaded with chemical weapons.

Rebel forces are converging on Al Safira from the east, the west and the south. Among them are brigades of the Jabhat al-Nusra which the US has designated part of al Qaeda in Iraq.

Success in seizing control of those stores would re-tilt the balance of the war in their favor and bring President Bashar Assad face to face with a decision on whether to broach the perilous dimension of chemical warfare on the rebels or even against NATO or US targets outside Syria.

A prime factor in his decision would be the information received in Moscow and Tehran – and almost certainly passed on to the Syrian ruler – that taking part in the offensive are rebels who underwent training in recent weeks in northern Jordan by US, Czech and Polish officers in tactics for seizing chemical or biological caches and dismantling them.

The battle for al Safira has brought US and NATO into direct intervention in Syrian hostilities. Western intelligence services estimate that even if Assad removed some of the banned weapons from this complex, large quantities remain and must be prevented from reaching the wrong hands.

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